The drive behind Critical Race Theory is not some honest attempt to understand the race issue in America. It’s not a new American Dilemma. Please don’t kid yourselves about that.
The essence of this dispute is simply this. First, a general background observation: there are things which many people are generally aware of, but are too polite to talk about. For many years, the Black situation in America has been one of them.
Every other racial minority in America has prospered. Indians who immigrate to America have much higher family income than whites. The Japanese were put into internment camps … and have flourished. The Chinese were explicitly excluded from immigration for a long time … .and have flourished.
Blacks, on average, have not. On average, Black students do very poorly on every sort of test — from IQ tests, to academic tests. There is no dispute about this.
But there could be a dispute about why. Generally, it’s a radioactive topic, so academics who value their careers — 99.99% of them — don’t touch the issue, and just mouth platitudes and pieties.
But … if we really want to have an honest conversation about race — about why 13% of the population commits more than 50% of the murders — well — polite people have been generally aware of the problem, but have not talked about it.
Now the Critical Race Theory people want to discuss it. Well … they don’t really want to discuss it — they don’t want to have a genuine discussion of possible explanations. What they want to do is to say: it’s white people’s fault. Black failure is due to ‘systemic racism’. A very selective racism, that doesn’t seem to affect a dark-skinned Hindu who speaks English with an accent, but does affect the majority of American Blacks.
If they wanted to have a real debate and discussion, then they would urge college courses on the subject to read Charles Murray, and his critics like James Flynn and others. But of course that’s the last thing that they want. They want obedience.
And liberals will give it to them. After all, way down deep most liberals believe Blacks are stupid — and need to be fed mythologies that the condescending white liberals wouldn’t put up with for a second were their own children to be taught such nonsense. [I don’t know if Portland, Oregon still physically exists, but if it does, aren’t they still teaching Black kids that they are descended from Egyptians, who had psionic powers? In fact, I think I first read about that atrocity here.]
It’s a power play by people who are “anti-capitalist” in a superficial way, who have a deep disdain for America, and — as America is now in decline — have decided to kick the enemy when he’s down.
Short term, it’s a smart strategy. Liberal custard-heads will wring their hands, and express sympathy by uttering the usual pieties– from behind the safety of their gated communities, as far away as they can get from concentrations of urban Blacks. Academics who want to keep their jobs will not commit Thoughtcrime by expressing opposition.
But … for the last sixty years, American whites have been indoctrinated with the idea that white racism is bad, wrong, unfair: give Blacks a fair chance, judge them on the content of their character, give them a bit of extra Affirmative Action help, and they’ll get right up there along with every other minority group that has come to America.
And a good thing, too. It’s a critical component of a decent liberal (in the general sense) society. Ignore race … treat everyone as an individual.
But now whites are being told, race is everything. And yours is evil. And so is your country, founded on racism. American patriotism is bad.
Of course, this will work on some of them — the kids who want to get cushy jobs in the ‘woke’ corporations will say whatever they’re required to say. But in the long term, it’s very dangerous. Start telling ordinary whites — those deplorables whose children aren’t going to become marketing consultants and website designers for multi-national corporations — that America is uniquely evil in its treatment of racial minorities, and they’ll start looking around at the rest of the world to see how minorities are treated in other countries.
Africa is of course an embarrassing topic for liberals and they generally pass over in silence thestomach-turning atrocities that the various tribes there regularly inflict on each other. But … you can’t fool life. If American whites are told that Blacks’ problems are due to their being a minority under the rule of whites, they’ll start to learn something about the places where Blacks rule themselves — Africa — and Haiti, Jamaica. Powerful stuff that white racism — magical long-distance powers.
American patriotism is in fact the only real anti-racism. America is not an ethnically-homogeneous nation-state. It’s only held together by an emotional, sub-rational commitment of a kind different than natural ethnic solidarity. And this committment is not immutable. Raise a generation — which we have done, among the ‘woke’ types — which despises its own country — mainly out of class snobbery –, and you’re getting close to the final chapter in a nation’s history.
Too bad. Really, really … too bad. Liberal democracy looked like conquering the world thirty years ago — the ‘end of history’.
Now it’s withering in its strongest bastion.
Great post. Come back soon.
